Friends,
I’ve been talking with a friend in the Provost’s office at Hunter about how to improve/expand feedback loops for teaching. She pointed me to an approach used at other campuses in which CTLs offer “formative assessments” (to use the lingo) early in the semester, visiting ongoing classes and talking with small groups of students about their learning.
We agree that the workload issues are insurmountable in thinking about scaling up an approach like this at our campus–our CTL is tiny and our faculty is vast, just like yours–but we started to imagine a better, richer form of the contract-mandated observations we already do.
So here’s the ask: how do y’all do observations? Is your CTL involved in any way in advising faculty on how to structure observations or reports? At Hunter, I think all faculty do it the way I do it in English: show up for a class, watch, and write a brief account of what happened, followed by a quick debrief. But there might be ways to make this laborious and time-consuming exercise more useful and effective, or so I imagine.
Any thoughts are welcome.
Jeff
This topic was also posted in: CUNY CTL Directors Council.
